User-generated content (UGC) online is quickly growing as the major reputation builder or destroyer for products, services and the companies that provide them. Some companies are already taking action by responding to blogs, posts, comments and tweets directly, curtailing the wildfire of negative feed back. When negative comments are posted online, health companies in particular don’t have the luxury of letting them go unanswered. However, in such a highly regulated industry most are struggling with how to engage.

Online Reputation Management

Online Reputation Management (ORM) is the awareness, research and analysis of online content and it’s effect on your brand, and the preventative and reactive steps taken to control the outcome. While literally every company in business today needs an effective ORM plan, steps can be taken now to review and understand your current online reputation and help you analyze appropriate ways to influence it.

Ignoring UGC

In the pre-internet age some believed that “no news is good news” but today that belief can mean an irreparably tarnished reputation and a significant decrease in sales. Legitimate problems, slander, and unanswered questions can negatively impact your bottom line even if you’re not aware of its presence as user-generated content spreads across the web.

At the very least, you’re missing valuable opportunities to interact directly with consumers and reinforce a positive image. Without that presence, consumers will turn elsewhere.

Steps to Take

By monitoring social media regularly, analyzing threads that pertain to you and utilizing online avenues to influence the result, you can successfully manage external effects on your online image and lay the groundwork for a positive reputation.

Monitor
First, you must have a plan in place to monitor and track mentions of your company, products and services online. Perform regular search audits on your brand. Social media sites such as Twitter and YouTube have built-in search options to help you find new mentions pertaining to your company. Google Alerts will send you an email every time your name is mentioned in a blog or website. Social Mention allows you to search across all social media platforms for the most relevant results. Use these and media-site specific search tools to stay abreast of online comments.

Analyze

Once you’ve established where users are talking about you and what you’re saying, you must determine what to respond to and how to respond effectively. Good mentions deserve your attention as well as negative press. People like to know they’re making a difference, so appreciate good comments, especially during waves of negativity. Analyze negative comments to determine if they’re legitimate, such as a bad product or experience, or if they’re simply slander. Problems should be addressed publicly and respectfully.

Slander should be addressed by politely requesting the poster to remove the comment or post your response as a follow-up. If the slanderer does not comply, turn the matter over to your legal team.

Influence

Create a plan for responding to UGC online. Have a clear system in place and make it known to all employees and vendors what they can expect from you in the event of negative press. Once you’ve identified the need to respond, simply hit-or-miss answers and inconsistent information will not benefit your company; it could in fact do more damage. Have clear roles defined for responders and hold them and yourself accountable for your reputation.

Your influence shouldn’t start nor end with responses to existing comments. Take control of your reputation by creating and regularly updating a blog, building brand awareness over social media outlets, and creating a community that you can control for consumers to discuss your products and services. Once a comment is made outside your own online sphere, you stand on the power of an established online presence and already have the forum in place for your response.

Your scope of influence should include your marketing team. A company that works together online and offline to create a strong brand will be recognized and respected by consumers. Ensure your marketing, legal, and customer service departments are aware and supportive of your online efforts.

Benefits

The risk involved in ignoring your company’s need for ORM is significant, and the benefits of ORM might surprise you:

• Build confidence and trust in your brand by delivering interesting, useful information, rewarding good feedback and building a strong customer-service team.
• Educate online users by posting follow-up information to negative press, publicize steps taken to rectify the situation and list positive results. If the follow-up steps aren’t made aware to the public, the assumption will be that your company did nothing. Take the time to inform them otherwise.
• Brand Awareness, which your marketing company works so hard to establish, can be worthless if not carried through online. By taking advantage of social media outlets and interacting with  consumers, you create a strong brand awareness in the medium that’s holding their attention in increasing quantities.

While it might not seem so important at first, user-generated content and it’s effect on your online reputation can be substantial enough to cripple even large corporations. By taking the time to plan and implement the above steps, you’ll successfully take the reigns of your online reputation back from the consumers.

Social Media Analytics Company

ManoByte is a Social Media Marketing company the specializes in Social Media Analytics, Brand Monitoring, and Reputation Management

Determining  whether the opinion of a post is not easy, but technologies such as Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics and Text Mining have made it a little easier. These technologies take care of the “heavy lifting”, making your Social Media Analytics process a little less consuming. It can be a consuming process.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) software endeavors to understand groupings of words to determine their meaning. In the case of Social Media Analytics, NLP tries to understand the sentiment of the word groups and rate them as either positive or negative. The problem comes in with understanding and ambiguity. Take for instance this simple example to help you understand one of the problems with NLP. Take the phrase “The house is small.” Is that a positive statement or a negative one? Well it all depends on the reader and what you are looking for. NLP is not perfect, yet but with a little manual work it can get you to where you need to be. Social Media Analysis will for some time be a semi-automated process because there are some things that software just can’t figure out.

Still, the ability to understand sentiments is an important factor. Understanding sentiments help towards understand ROI the of your Social Media initiatives. By setting a baseline of where your customer sentiments are today as collected through your Social Media Monitoring data-warehouse then over time watching how those sentiments improve can serve as a useful key performance indicator (KPI). Then you can tie the timing of the sentiment shift with sales for the same time period and now you have a measure that most executives will appreciate.

As you continue you Social Media Analytics process do not forget to collect and benchmark the sentiments of social web participants.

ManoByte helps with reputation management by providing your company with a complete analytic view of what is being said about your company across the Social Media sphere.

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Manobyte’s ability to track all of this discussion enables your company to listen and understand how various publics perceive you. Being able to then respond to your target audiences in a way that opens two way communication will strengthen your relationship and their loyalty.

Manobyte goes beyond finding and gathering these conversations. All of the data is analyzed, complete with audience demographics so you know not only what they’re saying but who is saying it. You may be attracting audiences you did not expect! Manobyte’s SM Analytic services provide you with real data, real feedback, and real answers.

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It is important to understand your customer’s buying cycle so I created this graph to help you understand it. Regardless of the business you are in this buying pattern holds true. Your understanding this model will help you in managing the relationship that you have with your customers. Each of these phases can be performed online. Today most consumers perform at least one of these phase activities online and are increasingly moving to performing the majority of these activities online.

The cycle begins with the research phase. During the Research phase consumers endeavor to find as much information as necessary to make them feel comfortable regarding the products of interest. This phase includes understanding features, comparisons, and cost. Many times consumers search the internet by keywords looking for product explanations, reviews, and ratings to assist them in become informed.

The next phase is Selection. This is the phase in which based on the information gathered in the research phase the consumer makes a value based decision regarding which product to purchase and from what vendor. Many businesses make the mistake of assuming that the selection in cost based. However, this is completely false. Consumers make their selection based on perceived value. Customers will select a higher cost product over a less expensive product, if the perceive the value of what they are purchasing as being high. Also, factored into the selection is who they are buying it from.

The third phase is Purchase. This step can and many times is done online however; certain products consumers still and perhaps will always fell more comfortable purchasing from a brick and mortar location.

The next two steps are Use followed by Evaluation. Based on the consumers’ experience of using the product they make an evaluation. Usage involves not only the function of the product (what it does) but also experience (how it got done). Online support tools help to increase the user experience. Based on the consumer’s experience they make an evaluation of the products. A product that may not function as high as expected might still receive a high evaluation if the experience is high.

The final step is Recommendation. This is the most important phase of the lifecycle for business owners. Your products and services live and die based on recommendations. It cost more to regain a customer then it does to keep a customer. A consumer may only a few people about a positive experience but they will tell many more about the bad experiences. Now on the internet disgruntled consumers can blog your business to death.

Understanding each of these phases and putting together a strategic plan to address each of them will have a tremendous affect on your business.

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